We welcome the ‘wretched refuse’

John Dunphy, Contributing columnist

Published
4:01 pm CDT, Tuesday, July 14, 2015

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We welcome the ‘wretched refuse’

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Donald Trump is convinced that Mexicans are ruining our nation. “The worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government,” he contended. Trump maintains that Mexico is sending its “most unwanted” people into our nation. Who are these people that Mexico is shipping across the border? “They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc,” Trump said. And these Mexicans are far from robust, according to the multi-billionaire. “Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” he warned. Trump’s anger isn’t confined to Mexicans. “The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world.”

Trump’s hateful rant about the United States becoming a “dumping ground,” has endeared him to no small number of Republican voters. A recent poll found Trump now leading twelve other contenders, including Jeb Bush and Rand Paul, for the GOP presidential nomination. The host of “The Apprentice,” who raised eyebrows back in 2006 when he joked that he’d date his own daughter if he weren’t her father, could become our nation’s next president.

If we Americans take Trump’s bigotry to heart and elect him to the presidency, we may well find ourselves obligated to deface one of our nation’s most beloved symbols: the Statue of Liberty. Why? Trump’s election will herald America’s formal repudiation of Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on a bronze plaque mounted inside the lower level of the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. We will be forced to remove that sonnet if we don’t want to look like hypocrites.

Written in 1883 and added to the Statue of Liberty in 1903, “The New Colossus” celebrates the statue as “the Mother of Exiles” and portrays her proclaiming to the nations of the world: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Inviting the world’s nations to send “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” stands in stark contrast to Trump’s vision of the United States as “a dumping ground for Mexico and….other parts of the world.”

Lazarus was a Jew and well aware that many of her co-religionists had fled persecution in other nations “to breathe free” in the United States. Decades after her sonnet was added to the Statue of Liberty, however, the United States closed its doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Too many Americans in the 1930s viewed those Jews in much the same way that Trump today views Mexicans and other nationalities.

This columnist’s ancestors in the nineteenth century fled poverty, famine and British oppression in Ireland for the United States. They didn’t have an easy time of it after arriving in this country. Despised for their ethnicity and Catholic religion, many Irish were forced to live in foul slums and work dangerous jobs for pennies a day. Shops placed signs in their windows warning “Dogs and Irish Keep Out.” Bigoted American-born Protestants, convinced that Irish and German Catholic immigrants were ruining the nation, founded the Know-Nothing Party to curb the immigration and naturalization of these undesirables.

Trump and his supporters are the ideological successors of both the Know-Nothings, who made my ancestors feel so unwelcome, as well as the 1930s anti-Semites, who refused to offer the United States as a sanctuary for Jews fleeing Hitler. I’m proud of the “wretched refuse” who were my ancestors and believe the Mother of Exiles’ lamp should be allowed to continue to blaze its welcome to “the homeless, tempest-tost.” Let’s keep Lazarus’ sonnet on the Statue of Liberty by rejecting Trump’s message.

John J. Dunphy is a writer and poet. He is the author of “Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois” and owns the Second Reading Book Shop in Alton.